Synthetic benchmarks

The Sony Xperia Z uses a Snapdragon APQ8064 S4 Pro chipset, which is the fastest to currently power an Android phone. It packs four Krait CPU cores clocked at 1.5GHz, 2GB of RAM and Adreno 320 GPU. That same chipset ticks inside the Oppo Find 5, Google Nexus 4, the LG Optimus G and the HTC DROID DNA / Butterfly.

The Krait cores are fast, no doubt about that - two of them were coming only slightly short of a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU and four make up a real beast. And the Xperia Z doesn't disappoint. It comes up on top in Benchmark Pi (which is all about single-threaded performance) and it's also on the top in Linpack (which focuses on multithreading).

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

Sony Xperia Z264

Oppo Find 5267

Sony Xperia T269

HTC One X+280

LG Optimus G285

Samsung Galaxy Note II305

HTC One X (Tegra 3)330

LG Optimus 4X HD350

Samsung Galaxy S III359

Meizu MX 4-core362

Nexus 4431

Linpack

Higher is better

Sony Xperia Z630

LG Optimus G608

Oppo Find 5593

Samsung Galaxy Note II214.3

Nexus 4213.5

Meizu MX 4-core189.1

HTC One X+177.7

Samsung Galaxy S III175.5

HTC One X160.9

LG Optimus 4X HD141.5

The clean sweep continued with consecutive victories in the three compound benchmarks AnTuTu, Quadrant and GeekBench 2.

AnTuTu

Higher is better

Sony Xperia Z20794

Oppo Find 515167

Nexus 415146

Samsung Galaxy Note II13562

HTC One X+13519

Samsung Galaxy S III12288

Meizu MX 4-core11820

HTC One X (Tegra 3)11633

LG Optimus G11226

Quadrant

Higher is better

Sony Xperia Z8075

HTC One X+7632

LG Optimus G7439

Oppo Find 57111

HTC One X5952

Samsung Galaxy Note II5916

Samsung Galaxy S III5450

Meizu MX 4-core5170

LG Optimus 4X HD4814

Nexus 44567

Geekbench 2

Higher is better

Sony Xperia Z2173

Samsung Galaxy S III1845

LG Optimus G1723

LG Optimus 4X HD1661

Sony Xperia V1638

HTC One X (Tegra 3)1634

Sony Xperia T1625

iPhone 51601

HTC One S1589

Sony Xperia E dual496

We ran GLBenchmark off-screen, which means we're testing at a fixed resolution, which lets us test the raw GPU power. The Xperia Z didn't disappoint, scoring as high as the Oppo Find 5 and the Nexus 4, and a tad better than the iPhone 5.

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

Oppo Find 530

Sony Xperia Z29

LG Optimus G29

Apple iPhone 527

Nexus 426

Samsung Galaxy Note II17

Samsung Galaxy S III15

HTC One X+12

HTC One X9

But most games will probably want to run at native resolution, so we're including Epic Citadel, which uses Unreal Engine 3. Unreal Engine is popular with mobile game makers, so it's a pretty important test. The benchmark was run at the High Quality setting and yet the Xperia Z once again topped posting an amazing result and was pushing against the 60fps limitation of the screen for almost the entire test.

Epic Citadel

Higher is better

Sony Xperia Z55.6

Nexus 453.9

LG Optimus G52.6

Samsung Galaxy S III41.3

Oppo Find 538.6

We were almost stating to suspect that the Xperia Z is an unbeatable benchmark champion, but the browser trials broke its streak. Of course that's more down to the Chrome browser than the actual computing prowess of the smartphone, but the SunSpider score of 1906ms was rather uninspiring. The Nexus 4 doesn't do too well here either - unlike its desktop counterpart, Chrome for Android just isn't very good at this test.

In BrowserMark 2 things started to look up again - the Xperia Z took the second place there - outrun only by the LG Optimus G, which has the same chipset but lowerscreen resolution (so, each time the phone redraws a web page, there's less than half the number of pixels to deal with). The Xperia Z also took the second place in the HTML5-test Vellamo, beaten only by the Galaxy Note II.

SunSpider

Lower is better

Samsung Ativ S891

Apple iPhone 5915

Nokia Lumia 920910

Samsung Galaxy Note II972

HTC One X+1001

Motorola RAZR i XT8901059

Samsung Galaxy S III1192

Meizu MX 4-core1312

LG Optimus G1353

Sony Xperia Z1906

Nexus 41971

Oppo Find 52045

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

LG Optimus G2555

Sony Xperia Z1865

Oppo Find 51797

Nexus 41794

Nokia Lumia 9201774

Nokia Lumia 8201760

Samsung Omnia W1632

Samsung Galaxy S III1247

Vellamo

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy Note II2418

Sony Xperia Z2189

HTC One X (Tegra 3)2078

Oppo Find 51658

Samsung Galaxy S III1641

LG Optimus 4X HD1568

LG Optimus G1522

Meizu MX 4-core1468

Nexus 41310

To sum things up, Sony has managed to extract more performance from the four Krait cores than any manufacturer to use this chipset. The Adreno 320 GPU does equally well - it manages playable framerates using a real-world 3D engine at FullHD resolution. It's hardly a surprise then, that the overall user experience with this one is smooth as butter.